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The Grad Students
Peter Jansen
The protagonist. Peter is an expert on venomous reptiles and envenomation in general. He is also Eric Jansen's younger brother.
- Decoy Protagonist: After being the obvious protagonist for the first half of the book, he's suddenly killed off at the halfway point. Rick Hutter takes up the mantle of protagonist afterwards.
- The Heart: He is the one person who everyone in the group gets along with.
- The Hero Dies: Gets killed by Nanigen Mooks Johnstone and Telius about halfway through the book.
- The Leader: Becomes this for the group post-shrinking. Unfortunately, it's also what gets him targeted and killed.
- Nice Guy: He gets along with everyone and takes everything in stride.
- Workplace-Acquired Abilities: Peter is an expert on venom, so he's able to provide vital information on the poisonous animals in the micro world as well as how to treat envenomation.
Rick Hutter
Rick is an ethnobotanist
, or an expert in tribal herbal remedies. He is also very opinionated and confrontational, which tends to rub people the wrong way.
, or an expert in tribal herbal remedies. He is also very opinionated and confrontational, which tends to rub people the wrong way.- Amazon Chaser: He falls for Karen during their time in the micro world and is grateful for her physical prowess.
- Hypocrite: Rick constantly lectures everyone else about the importance of nature and generally acts like an eco-warrior. He also likes to brag about his field work in Costa Rica and act like it makes him better than the other students. In reality, during his field work, he only camped out in the rain forest for two nights before the mosquitos drove him to a tourist lodge.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: At first, Rick appears to be very annoying and confrontational, which makes him hard to get along with. When the chips are down, however, he proves himself to be a loyal and helpful guy.
- Slap-Slap-Kiss: Rick and Karen absolutely despise each other - Karen thinks Rick is a try-hard know-it-all with a stick up his ass about environmental policy who chickened out in an expedition after all his ballyhooing of nature. Rick hates her for this. Naturally, after Peter and Erika's death, they get together.
- Workplace-Acquired Abilities: Rick's extensive knowledge of herbal remedies and plant-derived toxins allows him to make chemical weapons for the group. In particular, he uses his knowledge of tribal weapons and poisons to create blow darts dipped in curare.
Karen King
Karen is an arachnologist, or an expert in spiders, scorpions, and mites. She is also a fitness nut and is skilled in martial arts.
- Action Girl: She's tall, muscular and trained in several different kinds of martial arts. She kicks ass when the students are shrunk.
- Eaten Alive/: She gets Swallowed Whole by a myna bird. However, she doesn't die as she got stored in the bird's crop instead of being passed into the extremely dangerous gizzard. Because of this, she (with Rick's help) is soon able to escape.
- Slap-Slap-Kiss: Rick and Karen absolutely despise each other - Karen thinks Rick is a try-hard know-it-all with a stick up his ass about environmental policy who chickened out in an expedition after all his ballyhooing of nature. Rick hates her for this. Naturally, after Peter and Erika's death, they get together.
- Workplace-Acquired Abilities: As an arachnologist, she knows a lot about the spiders and mites that populate the micro world. At one point, she's able to use her knowledge of spider webs to save Erika when she's trapped in one.
Erika Moll
Erika is an entomologist (insect expert) and coleopterist (beetle expert). She's originally from Munich, Germany but recently arrived in Massachusetts to continue her studies.
- Freak Out: She completely melts down when the mynah birds attack, trying to escape in the insect truck in a fit of total panic. It doesn't work. The mynahs spot the shiny truck, pluck her neatly out of the driver's seat, and dismember her.
- Heroic BSoD: She really doesn't adapt well to the micro world. Her mental state increasingly gets worse as the plot goes on, especially after Peter's death. It's all the survivors can do to just keep her moving. It culminates in her having a Freak Out that ends up getting her killed.
- My Girl Is a Slut: She's noted to have slept with many men. Peter has zero problem with this.
- Really Gets Around: Erika is noted to have slept with multiple men in the biology department.
- Slut-Shaming: Rick does this to her. The other students don't seem to mind her promiscuity, however.
- Workplace-Acquired Abilities: Erika's extensive knowledge of insects really comes in handy once the grad students are stuck in the micro world. She's able to identify insects and tell the others about their behaviors, weak points, and offensive/defensive capabilities.
Amar Singh
Amar is a botanist studying plant hormones. He is the quietest member of the group.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Gets attacked by a gigantic centipede, which gives him a severe wound and envenomates him. He gets delirious and weak from the blood loss and poison and is slowly dying. However, what finishes him off is a gun shot from one of Vin's Drake's goons, which literally explodes him.
- Hinduism: He was raised as a Hindu and comes from a devout Hindu family, although he no longer seems to believe in it. He continues to be a vegetarian, however.
- Friend to All Living Things: Is a vegetarian and believes all creatures, even insects, are capable of suffering. Because of this, he refuses to work with lab animals.
- Nice Guy: He's kind to others and doesn't ruffle any feathers.
- Forgotten Fallen Friend: He's never mentioned again after his death. Peter, who died in the exact same way at the exact same time, is given much more attention after his death.
Jenny Linn
Jenny is a biochemist studying pheromones, the signaling scents used by animals and plants. She has a particular interest in plant communication.
- Asian and Nerdy: She's Asian and also extremely smart.
- Bury Your Gays: She is stated to "play for the other team". She is the first one killed out of the entire student group by a flash flood.
- Chekhov's Gun: She brings a case full of animal and plant-derived chemical volatiles to show to Vin Drake at Nanigen. After the students are shrunken, she douses Peter in a wasp-derived volatile to make him unappetizing to the snake Drake attempted to feed him to.
- Forgotten Fallen Friend: She's never mentioned again after her death midway through the book.
Danny Minot
A science studies doctoral student writing a thesis on "scientific linguistic codes and paradigm transformation." He doesn't really belong in the lab and tends to greatly annoy the other students.
doctoral student writing a thesis on "scientific linguistic codes and paradigm transformation." He doesn't really belong in the lab and tends to greatly annoy the other students.- Asshole Victim: Once everybody gets into the micro world, he's the only one that doesn't care about the others and only wants to screw them over for his own survival. And it culminates in him betraying the remaining survivors, knowing they will be killed, to Vincent Drake, in order to save his own ass.
- Body Horror: Midway through the book, a parasitic wasp injects his arm with her eggs. The eggs quickly hatch into larvae that literally eat his arm from the inside out.
- Dirty Coward: Danny proves himself to be one through and through, choosing to save himself at the expense of everyone else at every opportunity. The first glimpse that he's not merely a jerk happens during the flash food, when he has the opportunity to save Jenny who's in the water and in danger of drowning. To his credit, he tries to help her at first but then feels himself beginning to slip off the rock he's on and decides to let her go rather than risk falling into the flood with her. This results in Jenny drowning. Later on, he sells out the surviving students to Vin Drake to save himself.
- The Friend Nobody Likes: While the rest of the grad students get along to varying degrees, literally no one likes Danny and actively scorn him. Unlike the rest of the grad students, he's only a part of the lab because the head researcher's wife is his cousin.
- Hollywood Atheist: He mocks Erika whenever she prays and shows scorn for religion.
- The Load: He consistently refuses to help the others do anything, preferring to just sit and wait to be rescued.
- Nepotism: For the longest time, the other students didn't understand why he was allowed in the lab with them. As it turns out, the head researcher's wife is his cousin, which is the only reason he's a part of the lab.
- Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: Towards the end of the book, Danny contacts Vin Drake without the surviving students knowing about it. He sells them out to save his own ass. However, when he steals a micro-plane and tries to fly to Drake, he is attacked and eaten by a bat. Even if the bat hadn't eaten him, this trope still would have been his fate; Drake was planning to kill him after he had pumped enough information out of him.
- Workplace-Acquired Abilities: Averted. It's rather noticeable because all of the other grad students are able to use their areas of expertise to help out the group, but whenever Danny brings up anything related to his field the narrative and the other characters treat it as useless.
Nanigen
Vincent Drake
The CEO of Nanigen. He is a ruthless businessman who will do whatever it takes to get what he wants and to keep Nanigen on top.
- Big Bad: Of the whole story. He is a ruthless businessman who will kill anybody who is in his way cruelly - as is evident by the end of the novel, he has killed at least 13 people (that the police are aware of, anyway). And the terrifying thing is he only seems to do it for monetary gain superficially, but in the end really does seem to enjoy seeing people suffer.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: He is extremely egotistical and greedy and will resort to murder to get rid of anything that might threaten his company. To make matters even worse, it's eventually revealed that all he wants to do is sell Nanigen's incredibly dangerous tech to the highest bidder, even going behind the United States Department of Defense's back to do so.
- For the Evulz: While Greed is his primary motivator most of the time, Drake also just really enjoys being evil and hurting other people.
- Faux Affably Evil: He presents himself as a suave and well-spoken businessmen, but it takes very little to crack his mask and expose him for what he truly is.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: He developed the deadly nanobots himself and uses them to dispose of any threats. He also claims that the bots "respect" him because they don't attack him thanks to the controller he wields. At the end of the book, Eric Jansen destroys the controller, causing Drake to lose his immunity to the bots. They quickly turn on and kill him.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: He ends up getting skewered by an enlarged security nanobot.
- Villain Ball: He makes a series of very bad choices before and during the story. Nothing Drake does makes even the barest minimum of logical sense, serving only to dig him deeper and deeper into the hole of his own creation, and he is at all times needlessly sadistic.
Eric Jansen
Peter Jansen's older brother who is the Chief Technology Officer of Nanigen. His mysterious disappearance (and presumed death) in Hawaii kicks off the plot.
- The Ace: According to Peter, he's good at everything from science to sports to romance.
- Cool Big Bro: He is greatly admired by his younger brother and shares a close relationship with him.
- Irony: The plot of the book begins when he seemingly dies and his younger brother goes to look for him. In the end, he was never dead and Peter dies in the process of trying to find out what happened to him.
- Nice Guy: Much like his brother.
- Plot-Triggering Death: He disappears and is presumed dead in Hawaii under mysterious circumstances. This (along with the suspicious text message he sent Peter right before disappearing) kicks off the plot. As it turns out, he's not so dead after all.
Alyson Bender
The Chief Financial Officer of Nanigen. Although she goes along with Drake's plans for the most part, she has a conscience and tries to dissuade him.
- Heel–Face Door-Slam: After Drake shrinks the students and tries to feed them to a snake, she has an attack of conscience and smuggles them out of the Nanigen building. She waffles back and forth on what to do with them, but eventually decides to help them. Drake finds out and manages to talk her back onto his side, although afterwards he quickly kills her because he can no longer count on her loyalty.
- Horrible Judge of Character: Zigzagged. At first, she buys into Drake's fake persona and is taken by the things he does for her. After Drake attempts to murder Eric, though, she seems to avert this because she's fully aware of how dangerous Drake is and only cooperates with him out of fear of Drake framing her for his crimes or killing her. Later on, however, Drake is able to manipulate and sweet-talk her into thinking that's he's not a bad person and is only committing crimes for the greater good.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: How Drake disposes of Alyson and covers up the missing people's disappearance: he puts a knocked-out Alyson in his Bentley and shoves it off of a cliff, the cover story being that he students, rejoiced at being hired, went and got drunk, and drove off a cliff into the ocean. Ironically, Alyson was helping Drake stage the scene before he turned on her.
Jarel Kinsky
An engineer for the tensor generator at Nanigen. He was unfortunate enough to be in the generator room when Drake enacted his plan to get rid of the students by shrinking them.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: He makes the mistake of running past the entrance of an ant colony, which causes the soldier ants to attack him. They literally tear him limb from limb and eventually decapitate him before carrying him back piece by piece to the colony to be eaten.
- Fatal Family Photo: A "I want to go home and see my wife and kids" variant. Very soon after he says to the others that all he wants to do is make it back home to his family, he's attacked and butchered by ants.
- Horrible Judge of Character: He believes that Drake is a good person who cares about his employees, and that Drake shrinking him and the students is just a big mistake.
- Innocent Bystander: The only reason why he's involved in the plot at all is because he was unlucky enough to be in the generator room when Drake decided to use it to dispose of the students.
- Mr. Exposition: He reveals a lot about Nanigen's experiences with the tensor generator, the presence of the supply stations and the base on Tantalus, and the existence of the micro-bends.
- Off with His Head!: He is decapitated by ants.
- We Hardly Knew Ye: He's only introduced when the students get shrunken. He only sticks around for a couple of chapters before becoming the group's first victim.
Edward Catel
Drake's business partner.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: He'd have to be to work with Vincent Drake.
- Dissonant Serenity: As compared to Drake.
- Facial Horror: One of the nanobots bores through his cheek. He survives, but is left with a pretty nasty hole in the side of his face.
- Karma Houdini: He escapes alive at the end.
- No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Averted. All the info about his and Drake's work on the tensor is contained in documents and computer discs, which Catel absconds with after Drake is killed.
- Refuge in Audacity: After escaping Nanigen, he is bloodied and bruised and his clothes are torn, but he opts not to clean himself up, tend to his wounds or change clothing, and walks as he is to his destination, figuring most people will avoid a bloody man in torn clothes because he looks like a crazy person. He's right and reaches his destination unmolested.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Successfully pulls this at the end after everything at Nanigen falls apart. And he takes all the info about the tensor with him!
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Isn't too concerned about the nanobot that almost kills him, merely plucking it off of (well, out of) himself and flicking aside after crushing it.
- Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: He is much more pragmatic than Drake and finds his accomplice's shenanigans needlessly complicated and prone to attracting too much attention, and consequently advocates just plain killing the nosy students.
Johnstone and Telius
Two Nanigen security operatives who serve as henchmen for Drake.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: One is bitten by a spider while shrunken, and consequently swells up and explodes in a big glut of blood, guts, pus and venom. Yuck.
- Hero Killer: They're the ones who kill Peter.
- Last-Name Basis: We never get told their first names.
- Mooks: Although nominally just providing security for the facility, they're perfectly happy to pursue and attempt to kill the shrunken students on their boss' sayso without a hint of remorse.
- Private Military Contractors: The finest money can buy!
